Leadership and Strategic Decision-Making Frameworks Training Course

Course overview

Leadership is largely the accumulation of decisions, and most leaders have no method for making them. They gather some information, consult a few people, form a view, and then find reasons for the view they have already formed. This works acceptably for routine choices. It fails badly for the decisions that matter, which are precisely the ones that are novel, ambiguous and unforgiving of a confident mistake.

This course supplies the method. It covers decision frameworks and when each is appropriate, cognitive bias and the process controls that actually reduce it, risk and uncertainty as different problems requiring different treatment, scenario planning, group and board decision-making, and the honest use of data in decisions where the data is incomplete, which is all of them.

Why experience makes bad decisions more confident

The behavioral decision research is uncomfortable reading for senior leaders. Expertise produces reliable intuition only in environments that are regular enough to learn from and that provide rapid, unambiguous feedback. Chess and firefighting qualify. Strategic business decisions, where feedback arrives years later, confounded by a hundred other factors, largely do not.

What experience reliably does produce is confidence. A leader who has made twenty strategic calls has not necessarily learned to make them well, because they have rarely learned which of them were actually good decisions as opposed to good outcomes. Separating the two is one of the most useful things a leader can learn to do.

Course objectives

By the end of the course, participants will be able to:

• Record why a choice was made while the result is unknown.
• Justify the method chosen against the shape of the problem.
• Declare the countermeasure attached to a named bias up front.
• Bound the risk in writing before any exposure is taken.
• State which quantities carry no honest number at all.
• Log group dissent as it is raised rather than after the vote.
• Separate the evidence from the judgment inside one analysis.
• Revisit a stated estimate once the period it covered has closed.
• Score a choice on its process rather than on its result.

Course outline

Unit 1: Foundations of leadership decision-making

• Reversibility and consequence noted at the outset.
• The fast judgment recorded before the slow review.
• Conditions stated in advance for trusting intuition.
• Past cases judged on the reasoning written at the time.

Unit 2: Decision frameworks and models

• The rational model and the assumptions it must state.
• Bounded rationality and a satisficing rule set early.
• Multi-criteria decision analysis with pre-set weights.
• Choosing an approach on grounds stated first.

Unit 3: Risk and bias in decision-making

• The overconfidence named before the estimate is made.
• Awareness of a bias as no substitute for a written check.
• Red teams and assigned dissent booked before the vote.
• Ruin limits set in writing before the exposure begins.

Unit 4: Scenario planning and strategic choices

• Uncertainty declared unquantifiable up front.
• Dated assumptions filed against each strategic choice.
• Running a pre-mortem on a strategy not yet approved.
• Optionality priced while the choice is still open.

Unit 5: Group and board-level decision-making

• Groupthink preconditions listed ahead of the meeting.
• Writing down disagreement before a position hardens.
• Devil's advocate named in the papers beforehand.
• Board papers tested for what they let a director ask.

Unit 6: Data-informed decisions

• Questions marked at the start as beyond the data.
• Checking whether the comparison was set in advance.
• Dashboards weighed against the claim logged earlier.
• Recording the evidence and the judgment separately.

Unit 7: Sustaining decision-making excellence

• Decision journals filled in on the day of the choice.
• Grading decision quality apart from the outcome.
• Reasons written at the time against reasons recalled.
• The confidence stated as a number and read a year on.

How the course is delivered

Sessions combine structured explanation with documented case material: real strategic decisions, board papers, scenario studies and post-mortems that participants read, critique and re-decide in discussion. Worked examples take a decision apart and reconstruct the reasoning available at the time. Participants bring their own pending decisions to the room, and time is set aside for them. The course is educational and does not certify participants, and it does not constitute financial, legal or investment advice on any specific decision. Leaders whose decisions are dominated by risk exposure often continue with Risk-Based Decision Making for Executives.

Who should attend

• Senior leaders and executives who own consequential decisions.
• Board members and non-executive directors whose role is to challenge the reasoning behind a proposal.
• Strategy, risk and planning professionals who prepare decisions for others.
• Heads of function facing an irreversible commitment of resource.

About EuroQuest International Training

EuroQuest International Training was founded in 2015 by a team with more than 25 years of experience in professional development. We run over 1,000 courses and have trained more than 15,000 participants. Our head office is in Bratislava, Slovakia, and we deliver courses through hubs in Dubai, London, Barcelona, Istanbul, Vienna, Paris and Geneva. Courses are built and reviewed by practitioners who have worked in the fields they teach.

Frequently asked questions

Does this course teach me to distrust my own judgment?

It teaches you when to trust it. Intuition is reliable in some conditions and unreliable in others, and the difference is well understood. The point is to know which situation you are in.

Does the course include a live lab?

No. There is no live system or technical environment. Participants work from documented decision cases, board papers and worked examples argued through in the room.

Is there heavy mathematics involved?

No. Expected value, probability and decision analysis are explained from first principles with arithmetic. The course is about reasoning, not about calculation.

Related courses

• Strategic Thinking and Decision Making
• Crisis Decision-Making for Business Leaders
• Data-Driven Decision Making for Executives
• Advanced Leadership Strategies for Executives

Register for this course

Choose a city and date from the schedule above and register online, or contact the EuroQuest team for group bookings and in-house delivery. Our advisers can help you decide whether this course or a risk-focused course better fits your decisions.